I started learning Rails a few months ago, just before version 3 came out. My #1 tip - install Ruby Version Manager! Playing around with various different versions of Ruby, Rails and various gems, I managed to get my setup into a pretty broken state more than once. RVM lets you manage multiple Ruby installs on the same machine, which basically means that if you screw something up (or find out that a gem you needed to use won't work right with your version of Ruby/Rails) you don't have to reconfigure your entire machine.<p>If I had taken the time to install it straight away I would have saved a lot of wasted effort.